Pipes Of Peace

As tweeted on Twitter, and I'm coming to realise that if it serves any purpose then the Twitter thing is as a breaking-news or advance-notice facility, Muro's mayor is still blowing a whistle in favour of the Sa Pobla train extension; he being all aboard for a trip to end at the Es Foguero ruin. There is only one reason why: it would almost be in Muro, and he wouldn't have to drive as far to catch the 9.30 to Palma. Despite admitting that it doesn't really have a lot directly to do with him (actually, it doesn't have anything to do with him), he has raised a motion for the train to run by the side of Albufera and finish up by the ruin and therefore close to the Muro hospital; so says "The Bulletin". Not even Alcúdia's mayor supports this idea any longer. At one point he was in favour, but the governmental technical bods have closed the line on this one. This route was one considered under the so-called southern option. No-one now, apart from the mayor of Muro, is even talking about this. So the question has to be: why has he brought it up? The train extension would not pass through Muro, which means it really is not a matter on which Muro's opinion counts; all the environmentalists are against this option and pretty much all the rest of Muro council is in fact against it, so why go on about it? As is pointed out, this same mayor is the one who is in favour of the golf course on the Son Bosc finca. Maybe he just likes to antagonise the enviro lobby. Nothing wrong with that, but he's wrong on both counts, and not for environmental reasons. There is no need for the golf course, and the northern route for the train alongside the main road from Sa Pobla has been staring everyone in the face as the obvious choice ever since President Antich announced his age of the train. No, I really don't understand what the mayor is hoping to achieve, other than to perhaps make people realise that he's still there.


How To Ruin An Otherwise Perfectly Pleasant Sunday Afternoon
March entering as a lamb, how agreeable to take to the terrace and to the late-winter sun, the Sunday papers to hand. Only for it all to be shattered. What is that frightful noise? Oh no, don't let it be. Anything but that. I'm afraid it was though. Two down, the neighbours two down. They'd bought a CD. Giving it a bit of an airing. Outside. Quite loud. You could, unfortunately, imagine yourself at one of the local markets. It was a CD of the Ecuadorean, some say Peruvian, pipe players. Crimes against musicality. That's not what the CD is called; they are the offences, m'lud. Sting's "Fields of Barley", U2's "With Or Without You", Buggles, "Video Killed The Radio Star". How deeply, deeply unpleasant, especially bloody Buggles in a South-American Indian stylie. I really should have done what I said I was going to do with that pipe to that pipe-player at Puerto Pollensa market those years ago. Now, I might have to do it to my neighbour.


Maybe there is a way of getting hold of all the CDs and letting a JCB loose on them. That's what they do with pirated CDs and DVDs and the like. Well, that's what the photo in "The Diario" suggests happens. But what of the chaps that sell them? The street vendors, the looky-looky aka lucky-lucky men. I can tell you. They get let off. The paper reports the case of a gentleman of "sub-Saharan origin", in other words a luckster, who was nabbed in Arenal with 100 CDs and some DVDs and video games. The prosecution had wanted him to be banged up for a year and to be fined. The magistrate disagreed. It was a civil matter and not a criminal one, she said, and the scale - i.e. the number of discs etc involved - did not merit the sanction being called for in respect of the violation of copyright. The magistrate accepted that rights had to be protected, but the real villains were those who produced the pirated stuff on a grand scale. In this, she is absolutely right. Annoying though the lucksters can be (and not everyone finds them so), they are at the bottom of the pirating food chain and just trying to earn a centimo or two. You may recall that there is now a by-law in Alcúdia which makes it an offence to buy from illegal street sellers. So now the possibility would exist to fine a purchaser and not the seller. Meantime, can someone fine the people who make these bloody pipe-player CDs?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Village People (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9OO0S5w2k). Hard hat was one of the group (the construction worker), and I suppose Red Indians and indeed cowboys were hunters. Today's title - no, not really.

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